About Middle Age
A free, one-player worker-placement game about the thirty-odd hours a week that aren't already spoken for. Here's how it plays.
How a week goes
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Slice the week
A week is 168 hours. Sleep, work and the unavoidable (eating, washing, bins, waiting in for a parcel) take most of them. Pick how this one goes: a normal week, a sickie, a night owl, or above and beyond. Whatever's left becomes your spare time, one 🕐 for every six hours or so.
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Spend your spare time
Drag each clock into a part of your life: Work, Home, Body, People or Me Time. Each has its own things to do, from a Big Project to the doctor about the knee. There is never enough to go round. That's the game.
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Live it
The week happens. Your stats move, sometimes something unexpected turns up, and any clocks you didn't spend are Lost to Scrolling. Then it's Monday again. Fifty-two times.
Six things to keep from falling apart
Left alone, most of them slip. The higher any of them gets, the more it costs to keep it there.
- Health Your body, and how honest you are being with it.
- Finances Money, and the quiet constant maths about whether there is enough of it.
- Sanity Emotional bandwidth. The stat this game is quietly most interested in.
- Relationships Spouse, kids, friends, the group chat. Triaged together, as in life.
- Domestic Order The house, the post, and whether anyone could find the good scissors.
- Standing How work regards you. At zero, it stops regarding you at all.
Keep at something and it becomes you
Spend enough weeks in the same places and they turn into routes, seventeen of them. None of these is the good ending. They're all endings.
- 🏅 The Runner
- 🛠️ The DIYer
- 🥕 The Allotment
- 🏍️ Midlife Crisis
- 🧘 Inner Work
- 🍞 The Obsession
- 🎸 The Band
- 🏛️ Pillar of the Community
- 💍 The Marriage, Deliberately
- 🪜 The Ladder
- 💡 Side Hustle → Founder
- 🛶 Quiet Quitting
And at the end of the year, a verdict. Some of them:
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The Parish Overachiever
Your laminated sign-up sheets are, without irony, admired.
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Radical Neglect of Domestic Duties
The house has developed its own weather system.
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Zen Master of Doing Absolutely Nothing
People call this either enlightenment or negligence. You have stopped correcting them either way.
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A Perfectly Ordinary Year
You are, on the whole, roughly where you started, which is either disappointing or exactly the point.
Questions
Is it free?
Yes. No adverts, no purchases, no account needed.
How long does a game take?
A year is fifty-two weeks, and a week takes a few taps. Your year saves as you go, so you can play a week on the bus and pick it up later.
Does it work on my phone?
It's made for phones first: drag clocks with your thumb, or tap a clock and then a bucket. You can add it to your home screen and play offline.
Is there anything to unlock?
Finishing a year, any year, however it went, adds something to every year after it: new ways to spend the week, new places to put your time.
What is worker placement?
A kind of board game where you have a few workers and more jobs than you can do, so each turn is about where to put them. Here the workers are hours of your week.